HTML Entities

About this tool

HTML entities are escape sequences that represent special characters in web documents. Characters like <, >, & or accented letters can break markup or render incorrectly if not encoded properly. This tool encodes any text into safe HTML entities (&lt;, &amp;, &#233;) and also performs the reverse: it decodes named, decimal and hexadecimal entities back to their original characters. All processing happens in your browser: no data is sent to external servers, so it is safe to use with sensitive content.

Use cases

• Escape HTML code to display it as visible text in tutorials or documentation
• Prepare text with special characters for inclusion in HTML without breaking markup
• Decode entities produced by legacy systems or APIs
• Convert text with accents and symbols to a safe ASCII form

Frequently asked questions

What are HTML entities and what are they for?

HTML entities are sequences that start with & and end with ; representing special characters. They let you display reserved characters like < or & without the browser interpreting them as markup, and represent symbols that may not be available in the document's encoding.

Which characters does this tool encode?

When encoding, it always escapes the reserved HTML characters (&, <, >, double and single quotes) and converts any non-ASCII character (accents, emoji, symbols) to its numeric entity &#NNN;, which is safe in any encoding.

Which entity formats can I decode?

The decoder recognizes common named entities (&amp;, &lt;, &eacute;, &copy;...), decimal entities (&#233;) and hexadecimal entities (&#xE9;). Unknown or malformed entities are left unchanged so no information is lost.

Why doesn't &amp;lt; become < directly?

Decoding happens in a single pass, just like the browser does: &amp;lt; literally means the string &lt;, so it decodes to &lt; and not to <. If you need to decode twice, run the output through the tool again.